Inspiration, publication, and insight

Lewis had the idea very early; writes in his diary, September, 9 1923: "My head was very full of my old idea of a poem on my own version of the Cupid and Psyche story in which Psyche's sister would not be jealous, but unable to see anything but moors when Psyche showed her the palace. I have tried it twice before, once in couplet and once in ballad form."

It was written during 1955 and ready in typescript by beginning of February, 1956, and was originally entitled Bareface.

Lewis said: "In one sense the author has worked on this book most of his life, for this re-interpretation of an old story (readers need not know which when they begin) had lived with him and pestered him to make it ever since he was an undergraduate. Suddenly, last Spring [1955], the form presented itself. All came into focus: and had drawn into it many sympathies that had found no vehicle in earlier books--for the ugly woman, the barbarous idolator, the humane sceptic, and (above all) the friends and lovers of those who have a vocation or even a faith."

Lewis' own thoughts on what the book "means":

An author doesn't necessarily understand the meaning of his own story better than anyone else, so I give my account of Till we have Faces simply for what it is worth. The 'levels' I am conscious of are these:

A work of (supposed) historical imagination. A guess of what it might have been like in a little barbarous state on the borders of the Hellenistic world of Greek culture, just beginning to affect it. Hence the change from the old priest (of a very normal fertility mother-goddess) to Arnom; Stoic allegorizations of the myths standing to the original cult rather as Modernism to Christianity (but this is a parallel, not an allegory). Much that you take as allegory was intended solely as realisitic detail. The wagon men are nomads from the steppes. The children made mud pies not for symbolic purposes but because children do. The Pillar Room is simply a room. The Fox is such an educated Greek slave as you might find at a barbarous courst--and so on.

Psyche is an instance of the anima naturaliter Christiana making the best of the Pagan religion she is brought up in and thus being guided (but always 'under the cloud', always in terms of her own imaginations or that of her people) towards the true God. She is in some ways like Christ because every good man or woman is like Christ. What else could they be like? But of course my interest is primarily Orual.

Orual is (not a symbol) but an instance, a 'case' of human affection in its natural condition, true, tender, suffering, but in the long run tyrannically possessive and ready to turn to hatred when the beloved ceases to be its possession. What such love particularly cannot stand is to see the beloved passing into a sphere where it cannot follow. All this I hoped would stand as a mere story in its own right. But--

Of course I had always in mind its close parallel to what is probably happening at this moment in at least five families in your home town. Someone becomes a Christian, or in a family nominally Christian already, does something like becoming a missionary or entering a religious order. The others suffer a sense of outrage. What they love is being taken from them. The boy must be mad. And the conceit of him! Or: is there something in it after all? Let's hope it is only a phase! If only he had listened to his natural advisers. Oh come back, come back, be sensible, be the dear son we used to know! Now I, as a Christian, have a good deal of sympathy with those jealous, suffering, puzzled people (for they do suffer, and out of their suffering much of the bitterness against religion arises). I believe the thing is common. There is very nearly a touch of it in Luke II. 38, 'Son, why hast thou so dealt with us?' And is the reply easy for a loving heart to bear?

(letter to Clyde Kilby, February 10, 1957; in LL, 273-74).

Characters

Trom, king of Glome
Orual, eldest d.; narrator
Redieval--Tarin
Psyche
Ungit--the god; Aphrodite
the priest of Ungit; Arnom
the Fox--tutor, skeptic
Batta
the Shadowbrute; Cupid
Bardia--honest captain
Prince Argan--Trunia

Themes

1. Human attitudes toward God or the gods; according to Orual, the gods are unknowable, whimical, cruel, capricous, nasty, mean-spirited, not turstworthy, demanding, and so on.
2. The role of storge love; what is the hold that affectionate love has on humans? At what point does this kind of love cease to be love and becomes instead a demon?
3. Self-knowledge; what does it take for some humans to come to a real knowledge of self? At what point does Orual come into a knowledge of who she is and what she is willing to do to assure her survival? How does she handle the truth--about herself, Psyche, the gods, and so on?
   

Here is a very comprehensive bibliography on Till We Have Faces.